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Show Motherlunge a novel 18 refused to nurse, and fought her with kicks and tiny fists! Or stared right through her, not smiling, seeming not to see her or know her at all. Pavia's terrible indifference, and now her laughter without her. Her heart knocking, Dorothy got up and got dressed. She brushed her hair with long, tragic strokes, looking at herself in the mirror. With her mother and her baby in the living room, she grabbed Alva's purse from the kitchen counter and slipped out the back of the apartment. She got into her mother's car and drove to the next town, Springville, 40 miles east on the state road. She checked into the Rest Inn motel. She went to the drugstore and bought Modern Screen, which she had had a subscription to in high school, and then ate dinner in the motel cafe while she slowly leafed through the magazine. She felt the familiar chalk of its pages on her fingertips as she folded back each page.... Dorothy wondered. Did she still look like a teenager, a debutante, an ingenue? She slipped her wedding ring off her finger and put it in her purse. She smiled at the boy who filled her water glass in a way that she thought might be called fetching, though what did that mean, really? Dogs fetched, after all. Perhaps the idea was retrieving, as in / have retrieved your attention, have I not? As-in, I have regained my advantage? Dorothy went back to her motel room, switched on the TV, and watched it sitting up on the bed. (She didn't want to lie down just yet. It was My Fair Lady.) She got a bottle of coke from the machine in the lobby, then came back and drank it. She put all the motel towels down on the bed (Alva would approve of this), and moved the phone next to her on the bed. She found her wedding ring in her purse and put it back on her finger. On a commercial break, she slit one of her wrists with a razor. She felt something; not pain. A feeling of being discovered, like a talent. 7 |
